Embedded at Chopes

Tahiti is a place completely unlike anything

that I’ve ever seen before; it is at once breathtakingly beautiful and at the same time unrelentingly harsh. The land surrounding Teahupoo—a sleepy Tahitian town 11 months of the year—is moist and verdant. People smile and say, “bon jour” as you pass them on the road. The children ask for stickers and hats. The women are a perfect blend of soft, French features and smooth, dark Tahitian skin. Surrounded by all of this serenity sits a monster a few hundred yards out to sea, and it’s the reason that I’m here.

From where I sit writing this, you can literally hear Teahupoo grumbling on the reef. Like clockwork, it crashes and explodes time and again without fail. Sometimes swallowing a person, sometimes not. It seems everyone has sacrificed some flesh to the wave around here. No one in the house where I stay is unkissed by the reef. Stephen Koehne, an outer-island ripper, bears the lacerations of meeting the reef along his shoulder. It looks as if a mountain lion took a swipe at him. Kalani Chapman, a man that needs no introduction, is nursing a four-inch gouge along his right thigh that can’t seem to figure out if it wants to get infected or not. The wound is weeks old. No one seems immune, and truth be told, they don’t seem to care. They’re happy to sacrifice limb and skin if it means getting slotted in the most jaw-droppingly mesmerizing wave on the planet.

Today, the surf appeared meager considering what we’ve seen of Teahupoo in the past with the occasional overhead bomb detonating on the reef. But tomorrow, oh beloved tomorrow, the charts are calling for a significant bump and we’re looking at the possibility of Teahupoo bearing her teeth for the first day of competition. Stay tuned…—Jeff Mull